East German-Africans

Including, it will come as no shock to any woman that Cairo is ranked the worst city for women in the world.

Image: United Nations. Via Flickr CC.

A big talking point last week has been the lack of media coverage given to the blast in Somalia and its victims. Less discussed has been the unsurprising role of Somalians the world over giving immediate support, especially young tech people. 

(2) Joseph Duo, a former fighter in Liberia’s civil wars is running for one of the 73 open legislature seats and is symbolic of the transformations the country have undergone in the past decades

(3) On the long walks to freedom beat, a sequel to Nelson Mandela’s popular book is out. Some early reviews are already in (like this one in the Guardian by Gillian Slovo, daughter of Mandela confidante, Joe Slovo), while the South African Eyewitness News published an extract on its website. It will be interesting to see his reflection on his years in power (he only served one term as president from 1994 to 1999 before retiring) at a time when eyes are especially trained on the happenings around South Africa’s executive branch, particularly its current leader, Jacob Zuma.

(4) Remembering the generation that fought empire in Uganda and Mozambique’s “East German Africans.”  

(5) It will come as no shock to any woman who has been there that Cairo is ranked the worst city for women, in the world. 

(6) Large-scale farming and agribusiness is being touted as a path forward in Africa, but there are still many concerns. Here is one example of displacements in Zambia.

(7) Labor costs in Africa is evidently “too high” for the continent to become the next China.

(8) Much has been made of Africans leapfrogging when it comes to tech access on the globe. This week, for instance, it was revealed that more than 2 million people have used Airbnb in Africa. Yet the fact that many of the new innovations have no anchor on the continent means that we don’t keep much of the money here.

(9) Thinking about home-cooked solutions, watch a Ted talk on how Africans can use traditional knowledge to make progress. 

(10) Finally, listen to Mwalimu, and future Nobel Prize Winner (we can dream) Ngugi Wa Thiongo, talk about Shakespeare’s impact on East African culture and literature. 

Further Reading

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.